Amy Prunuske’s career is a healthy and happy mix of research, teaching, and community outreach — and she credits her time as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biochemistry with helping shape that diverse career.

After earning an undergraduate degree in zoology and doing cancer research in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research on campus, she went to the University of Utah for a Ph.D. in oncological sciences. An interest in the work of biochemistry professor Elizabeth Craig’s laboratory brought her back to the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2007 to 2011.

The Department of Biochemistry has welcomed Amy Betzelberger as its new undergraduate coordinator and advisor.

Betzelberger hails from Illinois and earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from Illinois State University and Ph.D. in plant biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. A postdoc took her to the University of Cape Town in South Africa before returning to the States as the science liaison for Agrible, Inc., an agricultural tech startup, where she worked until joining Biochemistry.

Assistant professor of biochemistry Vatsan Raman was recently named to a list of 44 young researchers featured in Biochemistry’s “Future of Biochemistry” special issue.

“It’s exciting to be invited to be part of this group, but what’s more exciting is that the rest of the researchers in this group are phenomenal,” Raman says. “I know some of them personally and they really cover the entire spectrum of research and represent the next big things in biochemistry. I’m happy to be a part of an amazing group of people that I respect.”

On January 9, 1922, Har Gobind Khorana was born in the small village of Ruipar, India, now part of Pakistan. Today, on what would be his 96th birthday, Khorana is honored by the daily Google doodle for his Nobel Prize-winning work deciphering the genetic code, which takes the information from DNA into RNA and finally proteins and is fundamental to all of biology.

The doodle shows Khorana working in the lab, with a depiction of his work, the alphabet within our RNA, highlighted in Google’s distinctive blue, red, yellow and green.

Coenzyme Q (CoQ) is a vital cog in the body’s energy-producing machinery, a kind of chemical gateway in the conversion of food into cellular fuel. But six decades removed from its discovery, scientists still can’t describe exactly how and when it is made.

Dave Pagliarini, an associate professor of biochemistry, says the list of unknowns is daunting. How does it migrate around in the cell? How does it get used up and replenished? What genes and proteins are responsible for CoQ dysfunction? Why does its presence decline as people age?

In the wild, chimpanzees face any number of dire threats, ranging from poachers to predators to deforestation.

That’s why scientists, investigating an outbreak of respiratory disease in a community of wild chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, were surprised and dismayed to discover that a human “common cold” virus known as rhinovirus C was killing healthy chimps.

“This was an explosive outbreak of severe coughing and sneezing,” says Tony Goldberg, a professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the senior authors of a...

John Ralph, biochemistry professor and researcher with the Wisconsin Energy Institute (WEI), has been named to Clarivate Analytics’ 2017 list of “Highly Cited Researchers.”

Ralph’s research areas include biofuels and other bioproducts, as well as plant genetics and breeding. His research group is recognized for their work with lignin, the polymer that strengthens plant cell walls.

Professor Aseem Ansari’s research group in the Department of Biochemistry has designed a molecule that can precisely target a specific part of DNA and “switch on” genes located there. Specifically, their molecule targets short sequences of DNA that repeat many times (GAA1-GAA2-GAA3-…). These GAA repeats cause the rare but fatal disease Friedreich’s ataxia, and molecules that target such sequences would open doors for possible treatments of the disease and many others like it caused by other repeats.

Only a little more than a decade out of his biochemistry undergraduate degree, Michael Rummel is an owner in and the chief operating officer of an independent laboratory based in Southern California named InSource Diagnostics.

The 2005 Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry graduate is on a mission to create a better patient experience and increase accessibility to preventative laboratory testing. His laboratory is pursuing the development of diagnostics assays that utilize a fraction of the blood needed when compared to historic assays. However, he is careful to point out that this...

Researchers in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry have discovered that a cellular pump known to move drugs like antibiotics out of E. coli bacteria has the potential to bring them in as well, opening new lines of research into combating the bacteria.

The discovery could rewrite almost 50 years of thinking about how these types of transporters function in the cell.

Cells must bring in and remove different materials to survive. To accomplish this, they utilize different transporter proteins in their cell membranes, most of which are powered by what...

The successful middle school outreach program called Project CRYSTAL has returned to the Holden Lab in the Department of Biochemistry. Professor Hazel Holden and a group of motivated undergraduates are showing six adventurous eighth graders the basics of biochemistry and X-ray crystallography throughout the 2017-18 school year.

The year 1917 — 100 years ago — was a big year for the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then called the Department of Agricultural Chemistry. Now in 2017 the department is celebrating the centennial of two major achievements: the discoveries of vitamin B and the link between goiter and iodine.

Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis were responsible for the discovery of “fat-soluble A” (which was eventually resolved into vitamins A, E, D, and K), and E. B. Hart and Harry Steenbock confirmed that iodine can alleviate goiter. These two important...

For biochemistry Ph.D. alumnus Frederick Porter, graduate school was a start to a second phase in his career. After beginning a career in the pharmaceutical industry, he came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry in his thirties to study virology under biochemistry professor Ann Palmenberg. After graduating in 2008 and completing a postdoc, his career took him out of the basic science lab and into vaccine product development.

After graduating from the department, Fred spent eight years in the vaccine industry where he held multiple roles leading the...

It’s square one. It’s step one. It puts the “basic” in basic science. How ever you describe it, understanding protein structure and function through what’s called X-ray crystallography is an important approach in many areas of biochemistry, including drug design. And it’s a technique many researchers in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison specialize in.

A computer repairperson can’t fix or improve a computer without knowing anything about the parts, and a scientist can’t work with a protein properly without knowledge of its basic structure first....

Think of the cellular machine known as the spliceosome as being like a car. For a car to function properly, its parts have to be assembled in a particular order. Additionally, many of the car’s parts have to also be put together before they can be put in the car, making up an increasingly complex system of assembly that must be tightly regulated to ensure it is done correctly.

In the case of the spliceosome, errors don’t result in recalls, but instead in a lack of the proteins humans need to survive or stay healthy. The spliceosome is responsible for taking RNA — which gets its...